(The Industry Standard)

Dust off your dancin' shoes. Over 223,000 Americans were thrown out of work last month.

What? You don't feel like celebrating? Then count yourself out of step with recent investors - and the "dot-com generation."

On Friday the Labor Department announced that U.S. unemployment reached 4.5 percent in April, the sharpest rise in jobless claims seen in more than 10 years. It was bad news all right - so bad, investors figured, that it seemed likely to goad the Fed into cutting interest rates by another half point at its May 15 meeting. And so investors poured more dollars back into the markets, pushing both the Nasdaq and Dow up for the week.

Such relentless optimism was too much for the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson, who complained, "A giant tree fell in the forest on Friday, but to stock market investors, it didn't make a sound." She had no trouble rounding up bears to insist that it won't matter how low rates go if consumers can't find jobs. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's Stephen Roach, for instance, predicted that as unemployment rises, consumer confidence would soon take a serious hit.

But then Roach probably doesn't hang out much with unemployed twentysomethings. And if you believe the Washington Post and the Times, many in the "dot-com generation" refuse to let a little thing like joblessness get them down. Both papers reported that the dot-canned are turning their unemployment into a kind of "spring break." As the Post's Ariana Eunjung Cha put it, instead of worrying about getting a job, "Workers who recently were laid off or quit their jobs are living bohemian lives of afternoon movies, massage classes, group trips to exotic places and, for some, plenty of drinking and 'deep thinking.'"

It's enough to irritate the hell out of a working stiff. Or even the Times' Matt Richtel, who wrote that today's unemployed may not be sufficiently cautious, since in the last economic downturn, they were so young that "their big worries involved acne and curfew."

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